


Everything In-Between

by aimmyarrowshigh



Category: Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, F/M, Gender Issues, Sexual Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-23
Updated: 2013-05-23
Packaged: 2017-12-12 17:36:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/814183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People didn’t live in a binary vacuum. At least, Mundanes didn’t. Clary didn’t, either. And she wouldn’t let Alec.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything In-Between

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MajestaMoniet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajestaMoniet/gifts).



> **Disclaimer** : I don't own anything. All characters, settings, and proprietary language are owned by the author of the work from which this is derived.
> 
> ORIGINALLY POSTED [HERE](http://aimmyarrowshigh.livejournal.com/80241.html) on 22 September 2011.

** Everything In-Between **

**  
_001._   
**  
People didn’t live in a binary vacuum. At least, Mundanes didn’t.

Shadowhunters, however, were not people – this was something that had been drummed into Alec since before he could understand the words – and the Shadowhunters’ world was a spectrum of black and white with no shades of gray in between.

Upperworlders and Downworlders.

Good and evil.

Fighting and dead.

The Clave and the Circle.

Heterosexual and wrong.

Alec Lightwood was none of the above. 

**_002._**  
When Alec kissed Magnus Bane, his world exploded. Things like ‘Upperworlder’ and ‘Downworlder’ stopped mattering. The dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ shifted with them. There was a space in life between ‘fighting’ and ‘dead,’ a space full of skin and breath and rumpled sheets, and pinkies linked across the kitchen table while the scent of coffee permeated the air. There was a space in life where Alec’s body felt useful for something other than parrying and killing and pain.

He hadn’t thought much about that before Magnus. 

His body seemed like all he noticed now.

**_003._**  
Whenever Magnus touched Alec, he felt a glow, a flood, a frisson: touch greater than the sum of its parts. If Magnus kissed Alec’s forehead, Alec felt it in his chest, warm and steeping like a roaring fire in autumn or the trill of the Shadowhunter language of Alicante, the language of Alec’s childhood when things were different. If he slid his hand over Alec’s knee, thumb rolling in circles on the inside of Alec’s thigh, then Alec felt it low in his belly, a sizzle that spread like flames.

When Jace touched Alec, he didn’t feel that kind of fire. Jace’s callused, scarred palm in his when they pulled each other up from the training room mats – or maybe pushed each other down, because both boys liked to win – was something Alec felt in his gut, right at the meat of him. They were _parabatai_ : closer than brothers. Their own organs, their cells, the nuclear cores of them knew it. If Magnus felt like fire, Jace felt like New York City streets in July – a warm, baking, inescapable heat that had become a part of his bones. 

When Clary traced the Fearless rune onto his skin,  
she felt like sparks.

**_004._**  
What Alec liked about Clary was that she hadn’t grown up in the two-tone world of the Shadowhunters, but she wasn’t apart from them, either. He had never really known any Mundanes, and while Isabelle thought Clary’s attitudes were childish and Jace seemed to find them charmingly quaint, Alec thought that the way Clary saw their world was fascinating. 

It seemed to Alec that Clary genuinely didn’t see differences between Shadowhunters, Mundies, vampires, warlocks, werewolves, and fae. She laid her head in vampire Simon’s lap to watch those silly cartoons as easily as she offered to read over werewolf Maia’s homework or let Shadowhunter Isabelle curl her lion’s mane of red hair. 

She carried with her a boundless, effervescent energy that rubbed off on everyone – well, maybe not Meliorn – and she seemed to get the same energy back tenfold. Maybe it was her angel blood, but Jace had that, too, and the only effect that Alec had ever noticed Jace having on peoples-at-large was inspiring annoyance tinged with some mild murderous rage.

Clary seemed to get a little bit better with every person she met, and she made them seem better, too.

She even seemed to want to give demons the benefit of the doubt. Clary brought that place between fighting and dead with her to patrols in a way that Alec had never seen. He hadn’t even thought it was possible to spare concern for anyone besides his parabatai – and really, Jace never needed or wanted concern anyway – in the heat of battle. But Clary’s green eyes would dart around the club or the rooftop or the alley and take inventory – Jace, then Isabelle, then Alec himself – before turning back to the stele in her hand. Her greatest weapon. 

Clary’s prowess with runes made her a line in the sand between the Clave and the Circle. The greatest asset for the Institute was created by the person who sought its destruction. 

It made sense to Alec that Clary’s first rune was _fearless_.

**_005._**  
People didn’t live in a binary vacuum. At least, Mundanes didn’t.

Clary didn’t, either. And she wouldn’t let Alec.

**_006._**  
“You can like boys and still like girls,” Clary murmured, the tips of her long, long hair tickling the crest of Alec’s collarbone as she draped herself over him to reach for the nightstand. “You can like boys who used to be girls or boys who are turning into girls. You can love anyone you want, as long as they’re worth you loving them. As long as it means something.”

Alec rolled over lazily, stretching, his hands looping around the slats of the headboard as all of his muscles shifted, feeling Clary’s touch in every part of him – Clary’s sparks had blossomed into fireworks, blooming great arcs of light into Alec’s world that split open the day-and-night sky into a thousand sunset colors. He opened one dark blue eye and watched Clary rummaging around in the pockets of her jeans on the floor, mapping the lines of her body. The curve of her spine, the waves of her hair, the faint white wires of old runes that twisted paths through her freckles. Clary didn’t have any permanent runes yet, but she didn’t have unblemished Mundane skin, either. An intersect between the two worlds.

“How do I know if they deserve it?” Alec asked. He stifled a yawn that purred into a groan as Clary settled her weight over the base of his spine and dug her little thumbs into the tense muscles that winged his shoulder blades.

Clary was quiet, following her hands with kisses as she worked all of the kinks out of Alec’s muscles. 

Then Alec felt sparks of a different heat: Clary traced a new rune into the smooth skin over the flat of his back, a series of rolling, open circles.

Alec sighed as the bright, hot-cold sensation of the rune rippled through him and Clary’s warm lips touched to its center. “What does it mean?”

Clary laid herself out over Alec, her curves fitting into the darts of his muscles. “It means freedom.” 

 

 [](http://statcounter.com/free-web-stats/)


End file.
